The implication is that people unable to work with PHP code will be comfortable
working with template files that better resemble plain HTML. Small changes to the
HTML can be made without interaction with the engineers, who might be grumpy about
making changes. In addition, the engineers won't have to worry about novices
introducing errors into their scripts.
If you face these issues, I encourage you to visit the FastTemplate home page
<http://www.thewebmasters.net/php/ >. You can download the class itself
along with documentation and examples. You may also like to read an article written by
Sascha Schumann that appeared on the PHPBuilder site
<http://www.phpbuilder.com/ >.
Midgard
Another approach to Web site design with PHP is the Midgard project
http://www.midgard-project.org/. The maintainers are Jukka Zitting and
Henri Bergius. Rather than code a solution in PHP alone, they have pursued integrating
PHP into their own application server. Midgard is capable of organizing more than
800,000 pages of content using a Web-based interface. For this reason it is ideal for
operating Magazine sites.
Midgard is an open source project, of course. You can download an official release, or
grab a snapshot through CVS. In order to install it, you must modify PHP slightly, but
instructions are available at the Midgard site. Because it requires compilation, running
Midgard on Windows is probably not worth the effort.
Ariadne
Still in beta at time of writing, Ariadne is a Web application framework from Muze, a
development agency in the Netherlands. It's available under the GNU Public License.
Auke van Slooten leads the project. The source code can be downloaded from the Muze
site <http://www.muze.nl/software/ariadne/ >.
Ariadne stores PHP source code as objects in a MySQL database. These objects interact
with each other using a virtual file system. A rich user interface is presented to the user
through Web pages, but advanced users may dig deeper, as well. Another major
component controls access rights for users or groups.
Preserving State and Providing Security
Chapter 15, "Sorting, Searching, and Random Numbers," outlines session
identifiers, but it may not have been immediately obvious why you would want to
implement them. You may wish to secure your Web application by requiring visitors to
identify themselves with a login and password. Requiring this page after page, though,
would be very annoying. You may even want to track users through the site without